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Usually I do my best to ignore the advertisements that expose the blatant exploitation of our personal information, lining the margins when you log in to Facebook or Google, but recently one of them caught my eye. Good job, Facebook: it’s my new favorite thing, and I want to tell you all about it!

Spoonflower. On their website you can design and order your very own fabrics to be printed up on your choice of fabrics (from upholstery weight to silk de chine) and shipped to you! Design your own fabric: it’s so cool! You can even sell your designs to their customers for a 10% royalty. AND they have weekly fabric design contests in which you can win a few free yards of your design and have your design featured on their homepage for the week.

Next week’s contest: Paisley! When I first found Spoonflower last week, I was playing around with an image of an abstract colored pencil drawing I did a couple years ago, and thought: Hey! This could totally be considered a paisley. A little unorthodox, but I think it counts.

After struggling with the computer for too long to get my design the way I wanted, I ended up with this:

Not exactly what I had meant it to be, but definitely funky. Anyways, I’ve learned my lesson. My advice to you: don’t bother trying to force your existing art into a repeating pattern unless it does so naturally. Make something new! Make it with the intention of a repeat in mind.

Non sequitur:

I’ve been in my hometown of Mendham, NJ for the past couple days, observing my former art teacher’s classes. It’s been really wonderful, and awful, and insane, and beautiful. But mostly, there’s this amazing old man who stands out at the end of his driveway every morning to wave to everyone on their way to school. I was walking by and we had a nice little chat. Nothing like a good old fashioned friendly conversation with a well-meaning stranger. It really made my day.